There was some little difficulty about a private room for the interview, but even this was secured, thanks to the good offices of Mike Walford, who took refuge with his wife in the bedroom of the proprietor, so that Bertha might have the room known as the “parlour” free for her interview with Edgar Bradgate, which she waited with a breathless impatience.
She was fumbling with a little calico bag, which she had pulled from the front of her blouse when he entered the room, and it was immediately evident to him that she was most painfully nervous, although when she spoke her voice was quiet and steady.
“I am sorry to have given you so much trouble and to seem so mysterious withal, but it was better for you that no one else should have any knowledge of what I have to give you. Of course you will remember your own property,” she said, as she slipped the little morocco case from the calico bag and laid it in his hand.
She had expected to see his face light up and to hear him exclaim: “Where did you get this from?” but, to her utter surprise and dismay, he only shook his head as he surveyed the case with mild curiosity, saying, in an indifferent tone:
“I think that you must have made a mistake. I don’t smoke, and I have never possessed a cigar case.”
“Look inside and then you will remember!” she cried, in a perfect agony of impatience. “It is not a cigar case—I mean, there are no cigars inside. No, that is not the way to open it. You press the spring like this. There! Now, do you remember it?” she asked, as the case flew open, revealing the stones inside.
“What are they?” he asked, looking at her now with such a genuine bewilderment in his face, that Bertha’s dismay rose almost to the point of actual panic.
“They are diamonds, your diamonds that you lost at Mestlebury in Nova Scotia,” she said, with a little catch coming into her voice.
“Ah, pardon, they are not mine, for I have never possessed a diamond, never even seen one in this state. If you had not told me they were diamonds, I should not have known them from pebbles,” he said, touching them now with a cautious forefinger, as if the thought of their value interested him.
Bertha drew her breath in a gasp of dismay and asked abruptly: “But are you not that Mr. Bradgate who nearly lost his life on the Shark’s Teeth rocks at Mestlebury, and was saved by a girl swimming out to him with a rope?”